Wednesday, April 26, 2006

To keep your mind sharp while sitting through professional conference presentations, adapt your homegrown library buzzword bingo game for recurring buzzwords dropped at the conference. Some real-life examples:

What do you do when a good friend goes to the "dark side", as it were, and starts to use these offensive, over-used phrases in everyday conversation as if they really mean something? Do you excuse yourself politely or just whack 'em over the head with something sharp?

A related game is tracking who has the most outdated words in their technology vocabulary. My recent favorite from last month was the department head who talked about digitalizing books so that users could find them on the Information Superhighway.

The buzz-term that I recently heard was, “drill down” – when referring to searching. It was confusing because no one applied the term the same way. One librarian stopped to ask, “That’s the right term, right?” I am still not sure because there was a collective, “Hmmm,” and the discussion carried on.

my current least favorites? "metrics", as in "we need to set up some metrics to evaluate that program"; "offline", as in "we can take this situation offline and deal with it after the meeting"; and anything thought of "out of the box."